Monthly Archives: October 2009

Understanding the most effective ways to respond to and cope with stress has important implications for our longevity and well-being. Acute stressors are immediate and temporary while chronic stressors are more prolonged and involve ongoing threat and arousal. With regard to acute psychological stress, past research has indicated that those who exhibit large physiological reactions (i.e., cardiovascular responses) are more susceptible to negative health outcomes such as hypertension. New evidence, however, casts doubt on the assertion that large physiological reactions to stress are always bad for health. Carroll, Lovallo, & Phillips (2009) have shown that low reactivity to acute psychological stress is associated with a diverse set of negative outcomes including depression, weight gain, and compromised immunity. These findings make it much more difficult to label stress responses and coping strategies as “good” versus “bad” given that each seems to have both positive and negative consequences for one’s physiological and psychological well-being.

A tragedy may have been averted when a knife was confiscated from a Delaware student last week. According to the New York Times, the school district’s rules say that Zachary Christie should be sent to reform school, where an important lesson is surely to be learned.

After joining the Cub Scouts, the knife-fork-spoon combo utensil seemed like it would be nice to use at lunch—on his food, we can presume. The lesson is more of a reminder: deterrence efforts are not as useful as policymakers hope. “It just seems unfair,” the 6-year-old said, probably not thinking about the intended effect of such policies.

Presuming that children are motivated by the economic or social benefits of finishing school, zero-tolerance policies are meant to give children motivation for following rules. But even the U.S. Department of Education admits zero-tolerance policies are inequitable and “counterproductive.”

Zachary’s case is similar to one in which a third grader was expelled for a year when her grandmother sent her with a birthday cake accompanied by a knife. Never mind that it proved useful for the teacher who proceeded to cut the cake, but heaven knows what the child would have done if she had gotten to it first.

Zero-tolerance policies should remind us of Reagan-era crime control models that brought us three-strikes-you’re-out laws. We now know that “criminals” or 6-year-olds are not rationally considering the possible consequences of their decisions in such a way, and I doubt Zachary’s peers feel any safer.

Neatly combining the topics of a number of my previous posts, namely the surveillance society, computer games, and Foucault, a new Internet ‘game’ is about to be launched that enables members of the public to win cash prizes by spotting criminals in ‘real-life’ video surveillance footage.

Although the United Kingdom has one of the highest proportion of video surveillance cameras in the world, the sheer amount of footage generated currently means that any criminals filmed are unlikely to be observed by any human camera operator, thereby escaping detection.

As described in Foucault’s book ‘Discipline and Punish’, this new scheme mirrors the design of Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, a proposed prison in which inmates are potentially under constant observation, yet are unaware whether they are actually being observed at any particular moment. Consequently, those under surveillance must behave as if their every action is observed, thereby subjecting themselves to discipline instead of having it forced upon them, and so becoming the instruments of their own control.

The widespread connectivity provided by the Internet similarly enables numerous members of the public to co-operate in tackling somewhat more altruistic large-scale projects, exemplified by the collaboratively produced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Likewise, the open-source software movement is able to work together to develop free alternatives to commercial products, despite being geographically distributed. These include operating systems, office productivity suites, web-browsers, and for those of you currently involved in academic writing, reference managers.

This use of human ‘distributed processing’ mirrors the design of super-computers, in which a large number of relatively low-powered processors concurrently tackle small sub-parts of a much larger and more complex task. Once again, the Internet can be key in facilitating the necessary interconnections, as illustrated by the SETI@home project, where members of the public donate the spare computing power of their home PC to help the search for extra-terrestrial life.

Story from the Daily Mail

Sunar, D. (2009). Suggestions for a New Integration in the Psychology of Morality

On September 30 Wiley-Blackwell announced the winner of their inaugural Wiley Prize in Psychology — Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Positive Psychology Center. While his career contributions are certainly immense, other scholars and, most recently, popular authors, have turned a critical eye to positive psychology.

While Becker and Marecek are not against the idea of “human flourishing,” they see it “not as a matter of private satisfaction, but as a matter of the collective welfare.” This idea is particularly relevant in the current global recession and the discourse of individualism is also prominent in U.S. debates on healthcare. In the U.S., where “boot-straps” philosophy reigns supreme, Becker and Marecek argue that the suggestion “that self-help excercises can suffice in the absence of social transformation is not only short signted but morally repugnant.”

Thus we, as humans living in our societies and bound by institutions, have to ask ourselves the extent to which personal happiness and a sense of fulfillment is tied to broader social influences. Can we “will” ourselves to be happy through the use of affirmations, or are we simply creating convenient illusions to persevere through difficult times?

Just over 174 years ago, on September 17, 1835, the HMS Beagle landed on San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos. After over a month of surveying the islands, looking especially for fossils, volcanic activity, and geological features, Charles Darwin left most notably with a collection of birds. He first noticed that mockingbirds of the various islands exhibited considerable variation. But of all the bizarrely tame birds, he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle that the finches “form a most singular group … related to each other in the structure of their beaks, short tails, form of body and plumage.” The variation in Darwin’s finches was to be significant for his concept of natural selection.

Now, just to the west of where the Beagle first landed, descendents of Darwin’s finches find a food source in the dump of Puerto Ayora, a quickly growing town of about 10,000. The New York Times reports an ecological crisis on the archipelago, as the tourism-driven economy supports a population explosion coming largely from migrant Ecuadoreans. In the last year the government sent over 1,000 people back to Ecuador, no doubt because of pressure from preservationists who worry about the boobies and tortoises.

For evolutionary psychology, this story marks an odd union between the biological and the social. Literally trampling on the roots of a theory of evolution is an introduced population of pigs, running at times from hungry migrants who moved from their homeland for a chance at a decent life. Today in the Galápagos, evolution in the form Darwin observed is being crowded by the social world—a reminder, perhaps, that humans are not exempt from change.

A recent Welsh video that addresses the dangers of texting while driving has become an internet phenomenon with over 7 million views to date. The video, which will be shown in schools in this fall, features a teenager texting while driving, resulting in a graphic car crash that kills her passengers.

The creators of the ad argue that in order to capture the attention of teenagers, it is necessary for the video to be shocking and violent. However, some critics are skeptical about whether the ad will actually reduce the behavior, especially in the long-term. Health and social psychological research has looked extensively at the efficacy of fear arousing messages when it comes to changing behaviors.

In a recent article, Cameron and Chan (2008) discuss what persuasive elements may help in promoting health behaviors. It is commonly assumed that messages that evoke fear will prompt action; however, many studies have shown that highly evocative messages may actually lead to avoidance and fail to change behavior. In the health communication field, they find that fear arousing messages can be effective but only when coupled with other factors. For instance, when joined with an implementation plan, these messages have a better chance of changing behavior. Moreover, imagery may be effective in persuasive messages but only to the extent that it can directly relate the threat to the recommended plan of action.

While the commercial may be successful in garnering attention, ongoing research brings into question how effective it will be in terms of permanently changing behavior.